As the editor of Opera magazine, John Allison, notes in his editorial in the June issue, Donizetti fans are currently spoilt for choice, enjoying a ‘Donizetti revival’ with productions of several of the composer’s lesser known works cropping up in houses around the world.

This Winterreise is the final instalment of Matthias Goerne’s series of Schubert lieder for Harmonia Mundi and it brings the Matthias Goerne Schubert Edition, begun in 2008, to a dark, harrowing close.

We see the characters first in two boxes at an opera house. The five singers share a box and stare at the stage. But Konstanze’s eye is caught by a man in a box opposite: Bassa Selim (actor Tobias Moretti), who stares steadily at her and broods in voiceover at having lost her, his inspiration.

Richard Strauss may be most closely associated with the soprano voice but
this recording of a selection of the composer’s lieder by baritone Thomas
Hampson is a welcome reminder that the rapt lyricism of Strauss’s settings
can be rendered with equal beauty and character by the low male voice.

Bernarda Fink’s recording of Gustav Mahler’s Lieder is an important new release that includes outstanding performances of the composer’s well-known songs, along with compelling readings of some less-familiar ones.

This live performance of Laurent Pelly’s Glyndebourne staging of
Humperdinck’s affectionately regarded fairy tale opera, was recorded at
Glyndebourne Opera House in July and August 2010, and the handsomely produced
disc set — the discs are presented in a hard-backed, glossy-leaved book and
supplemented by numerous production photographs and an informative article by
Julian Johnson — is certainly stylish and unquestionably recommendable.

Recorded at a live performance in 2012, this CD brings together an eclectic
selection of turn-of-the-century orchestral songs and affirms the extraordinary
versatility, musicianship and technical accomplishment of mezzo-soprano
Magdalena Kožená.

Once I was: Songs by Ricky Ian Gordon features an assortment of
songs by Ricky Ian Gordon interpreted by soprano Stacey Tappan, a longtime
friend of the composer since their work on his opera Morning Star at
the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Alfredo Kraus, one of the most astute artists in operatic history in terms of careful management of technique and vocal resources, once said in an interview that ‘you have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.’

In the thirty-five years immediately following its American première at the Metropolitan Opera in 1914, Italo Montemezzi’s ‘Tragic Poem in Three Acts’ L’amore dei tre re was performed in New York on sixty-six occasions.

Known principally for its two concert show-pieces for the leading lady, the success of Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur relies upon finding a soprano willing to take on, and able to pull off, the eponymous role.

It is set in the
Netherlands: a woman sues the fiancé of her daughter Eve for having broken a
precious jug, in a court presided over by Judge Adam; as it happens Judge Adam
himself broke the jug while sneaking into Eve’s room in an attempt to
seduce her, and was severely injured trying to escape. As the (excellent)
conductor, James Conlon, says in the liner notes, the jug represents
Eve’s virginity. One might think of Pope’s famous couplet:
“Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law, / Or some frail China
jar receive a flaw…” But the jug has far greater symbolic import,
too: Eve’s mother points out that famous figures from Dutch history were
depicted on the jug, and to Kleist the jug represents history itself, a tale
shattered by human vice. As Kafka says, the Last Judgment in a court in
perpetual session.

The staging of the opera (directed by Darko Tresnjak, with sets by Ralph
Funicello) is good. The sky and the background windmills are colored like sin,
ranging from lurid red to livid blue; during the overture, in an especially
nice touch, dancers in silhouette, framed by a huge jug-arch, pantomime the
events preliminary to the action. It is as if the drama were itself taking
place on a great delft vase. The singing and the acting are enjoyably
competent, but not more.

Ullmann’s opera is not one of his better works. In places there is
rhythmic pungency, sometimes in a finely Prokofiev-like manner, but much of the
music is generally peppy or generally mock-serious—there is none of
blackness found in his other operas, Der Sturz des Antichrist and
Der Kaiser von Atlantis. It would have better if the music had cut
deeper, as Kleist’s play does, despite its cheerfulness. On the other
hand, Kleist once wrote that we need to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil a second time, to recover our lost innocence, to become pure,
as a puppet or a god is pure; and maybe Ullmann has tried to restore something
of the innocence that was lost in the fall of man.

Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg is on an altogether
different plane of achievement. The plot, derived from an Oscar Wilde fairy
tale, is simple: on the Infantin’s eighteenth birthday her playmates
frolic about her, and she receives many gorgeous gifts; the chamberlain tells
us that the most beautiful of all is also the most abominable, a dwarf whose
hideousness has been concealed from him all his life, for he has never been
allowed to see a mirror; for sport the Infantin pretends to fall in love with
him, but comes to think it would be still better sport to show him what he
looks like; he peers into a mirror, and shrieks; the Infantin tells him that
she never loved him—who could love a grotesque little
hunchback?—and he dies of a broken heart; the Infanta notes that a
favorite toy is broken, and returns to the land of tra-la-la.

The plot sounds like a version or perversion of the first scene of Das
Rheingold: here, when the ugly dwarf falls in love with the beautiful
maiden, we feel pity for the dwarf and contempt for the maiden. And there is
even a moment of musical resemblance, when the orchestra plays limping figures
as the chamberlain describes the dwarf, similar to those we hear in the earlier
opera at Alberich’s entrance. But what Zemlinsky’s music tells us
is that his opera is a version or perversion of the Olympia act in Les
contes d’Hoffmann, for the Infantin is like a mechanical doll, and
the dwarf is a poet who considers her a creature straight from a romantic
poem.

This performance (also designed by Tresnjak and Funicello) is somewhat
unsatisfactory. The set is handsome, with its black marble walls and golden
stairs. But this very dark, spare set isn’t right for an opera where,
especially at the beginning, all should be bejeweled, glittery, full of
sunlight. It would have been better to look to Velázquez for inspiration, not
Zurbarán. Mary Dunleavy, the Infantin, has a potent voice, a little shrill at
times; she makes her character less a spoiled horror in a pretty dress than a
playfully self-indulgent girl, caught up in a game whose consequences she
doesn’t understand. I wouldn’t have guess that a production could
go a ways toward exculpating the Infantin, but I was intrigued by this idea.
What seemed wrong to me was Dunleavy’s naturalness, her smiling ease as
she played her game: she might have been Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier
talking demurely with Octavian.

I understand the Infantin (as I believe Wilde understood her) as pure
artifice—better to have her move jerkily like a robot than to make her a
character with an interesting personality. As the dwarf, Rodrick Dixon was
superb, a figure of energy and a sort of supple pathos, ready to accommodate
himself to the shifting viciousnesses around him.

But still, this is an opera that I find intensely moving. I have loved it
for many years, and my life would have been poorer without it.